Post Tagged with: "corporations"

Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share

Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share

ipoman-full

On January 26, 2008, a 30-year-old part-time entrepreneur named Mike Merrill decided to sell himself on the open market. He divided himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 a share. Each share would earn a potential return on profits he made outside of his day job as a customer service rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company. Over the next 10 days, 12 of his friends and acquaintances bought 929 shares, and Merrill ended up with a handful of extra cash. He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting: He’d let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life.

Full Story: Wired: Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share

March 28, 2013 0 comments
The Corporation Who Would Be King

The Corporation Who Would Be King

Some design fiction from Tim Maly, who wrote that thing about corporations being bad AI:

“…if a firm, partnership, company, or corporation owns real property within the municipality, the president, vice president, secretary, or other designee of the entity is eligible to vote in a municipal election…”
-Montana Bill Would Give Corporations The Right To Vote by Ian Millhiser for Thinkprogress

A broader version of this law passes, leading to an explosion of algorithmic corporations owning nominal fractions of land to meet the real property requirement.

Eventually, the corporate hordes overrun their human voter counterparts. A ballot measure is introduced allowing corporations to stand for election. It passes. Now, their dark work begins.

Full Story: Quiet Babylon: The Corporation Who Would be King

March 21, 2013 0 comments
Corporations Are “Bad AI”

Corporations Are “Bad AI”

Tim Maly writes:

One of my favourite recurring tropes of AI speculation/singulatarian deep time thinking is mediations on how an evil AI or similar might destroy us. [...]

And all I can think is: we already have one of those. It is pretty clear to anyone who’s paying attention that 1. a marketplace regime of firms dedicated to maximizing profit has—broadly speaking—added a lot of value to the world 2. there are a lot of important cases where corporate profit maximization causes harm to humans 3. corporations are—broadly speaking—really good at ensuring that their needs are met.

I don’t think that it’s all that far fetched to suggest that maybe they’re getting better and better at ensuring their needs are met. Pretty much the only thing that the left and right in America can agree on is that moneyed influence has corrupted American politics and yet neither side seems able to do much of anything about it.

Full Story: Quiet Babylon: The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations

See also: Yes, There is a Sub-Reddit Dedicated to Preventing SkyNet

March 4, 2013 0 comments
Brand Fanaticism Lights Up Same Part of the Brain as Religion

Brand Fanaticism Lights Up Same Part of the Brain as Religion

Glycon

Curt Hopkins compares the discovery that a company’s logo lights up the same brain regions in fans of that company that religious iconographic lights up in followers of the religion.

Anyway, the public (well, at least the free, male, moneyed public) that took such a hands-on role in shaping the policy of the Republic was displaced by an Imperial government that consolidated power in one man, whose will was carried out by a bureaucracy. When that happened, the formerly most influential elements of the society turned away from public life to “mystery religions”: Mithraism, the worship of Isis and of course Christianity.

In the same way, it feels that we’ve lost something in turn. I’m not sure what it is – religious faith, political will, tribal affiliation? – but I can feel it. With the loss of that thing, people have turned to brands, particularly to tech brands, with their promise of connection, amplification, justification, belonging. The promise of salvation and relevance.

ReadWriteWeb: Thou Shalt Have No Other Jobs Before Me: Geek Fanatacism Lights Up Same Part of the Brain as Religion

Also check out what Douglas Rushkoff has to say about the future of branding in social media.

May 31, 2011 0 comments
Grant Morrison Documentary Out Now – Plus, New Wired Interview

Grant Morrison Documentary Out Now – Plus, New Wired Interview

Talking with Gods

Talking with Gods, the Grant Morrison documentary, is now available on DVD or for download from the Halo Eight Online Store or DVD from Amazon.com.

Update: There’s also a new expanded two disc version. If you already bought the original, you can also buy disk two separately, both on DVD or as a digital download.

Also, Wired has an interview with Morrison on his new Batman, Inc. series which sounds pretty interesting (perhaps he’ll get to incorporate his ideas from his aborted Wildcats series):

Superheroes have always been about becoming whatever we’ve needed them to be at any given time. Lately, we’ve made them like Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates, weaponized supersoldiers working for the military-industrial complex, which then grew into Iron Man, who is a superhero celebrity, an everyone-is-a-star kind of thing. But give it another five years and it could be cosmic seekers again, because of the new drugs coming onto the market. Or it could be something else entirely. They’ll take the form of whatever our dreams or ideals happen to be. [...]

Most corporations seem pretty demonic. Corporations as entities are strange things. Because no one person is really in charge, we’ve conjured some predatory, ravenous entities. But Batman, Inc. is an attempt to reimagine what a good corporation can be. It’s not the first time this has happened in comics: Joe Casey tried to imagine the same thing with Wildcats. But this will be Bruce Wayne’s attempt, and I think it’s going to be quite progressive.

Wired: Grant Morrison’s Batman, Inc. Births Comics’ First Zen Billionaire

I think a case could be made that Adrian Veidt (himself based on Tibetan Buddhist Peter Cannon) as the first comics’ first “zen” (used loosely) billionaire.

November 4, 2010 0 comments
Douglas Rushkoff Interviews Harvey Pekar – in Comic Form

Douglas Rushkoff Interviews Harvey Pekar – in Comic Form

Pekar project with Douglas Rushkoff

Pekar Project: PEKAR & RUSHKOFF KIBBITZIN’ HOW LIFE GOT INCORPORATED

(via Dangerous Minds)

July 7, 2010 0 comments
It’s Official: Google Can Sell Power Like a Utility

It’s Official: Google Can Sell Power Like a Utility

Google Utility

The Federal Regulatory Energy Commission has granted Google Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of the search giant, the right to behave like a utility.

The order grants Google Energy the power to sell energy, capacity and services at market rates.

Why does Google want to do this? Right now, the company rakes in billions of dollars from ads and it doesn’t have to have extensive support desks and remote repair teams — i.e., the kind of people power providers must have on staff — in order to do it. Selling power is a much more hands-on business.

Google has said it wants to go carbon neutral. With the FERC order, it can now effectively erect as many solar panels and install as many fuel cells as it likes without worrying about having purchased too much capacity; the company can now sell off the extra power it generates.

GreenTechMedia: It’s Official: Google Can Sell Power Like a Utility

See also:

Google’s Addiction to Cheap Power

February 19, 2010 0 comments
Glenn Greenwald: What the Supreme Court got right

Glenn Greenwald: What the Supreme Court got right

supreme court

There’s been much bathos since yesterday’s Supreme Court decision regarding restrictions on political speech. Greenwald is the voice of reason here:

The Supreme Court yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, declared unconstitutional (on First Amendment grounds) campaign finance regulations which restrict the ability of corporations and unions to use funds from their general treasury for “electioneering” purposes. The case, Citizens United v. FEC, presents some very difficult free speech questions, and I’m deeply ambivalent about the court’s ruling. There are several dubious aspects of the majority’s opinion (principally its decision to invalidate the entire campaign finance scheme rather than exercising “judicial restraint” through a narrower holding). Beyond that, I believe that corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture. But there are also very real First Amendment interests implicated by laws which bar entities from spending money to express political viewpoints. [...]

All of the hand-wringing sounds to me like someone expressing serious worry that a new law in North Korea will make the country more tyrannical. There’s not much room for our corporatist political system to get more corporatist. Does anyone believe that the ability of corporations to influence our political process was meaningfully limited before yesterday’s issuance of this ruling?

Glenn Greenwald: What the Supreme Court got right

Read the whole thing, including the updates at the end.

January 23, 2010 0 comments
Goldman Sachs bankers aren’t packing heat after all

Goldman Sachs bankers aren’t packing heat after all

Follow-up to this post:

New York police spokesman Paul J. Browne says that their records show only four Goldman employees have applied for gun permits in recent years — and the last application was made in 2003. That application, by the firm’s head of security for a “carry permit”, was granted. The only other employee granted a NYPD carry permit” is a building security guard. It was issued prior to 2003, said a police spokesman. Those applying for a permit must list their employer.

Wall Street Journal: Are Goldman Sachs Bankers Really Carrying Guns?

December 11, 2009 0 comments
Goldman Sachs bankers buying handguns to protect themselves against the proletariat

Goldman Sachs bankers buying handguns to protect themselves against the proletariat

Update: turns out this isn’t true.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.

While we wait, Goldman has wrapped itself in the flag of Warren Buffett, with whom it will jointly donate $500 million, part of an effort to burnish its image — and gain new Goldman clients. Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein also reversed himself after having previously called Goldman’s greed “God’s work” and apologized earlier this month for having participated in things that were “clearly wrong.”

Has it really come to this? Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology. Talk that Goldman bankers might have armed themselves in self-defense would sound ludicrous, were it not so apt a metaphor for the way that the most successful people on Wall Street have become a target for public rage.

Bloomberg: Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public

(via Global Guerillas)

See also this USA Today story about skyrocketing corporate security spending:

Companies have been slashing almost every cost imaginable to survive the recession, yet they are spending more than ever to calm CEOs who fear for their personal safety.

Starbucks, which has laid off workers, closed stores and switched from whole to 2% milk to save pennies a gallon, bumped its spending to $511,079 last year on the personal and home security of CEO Howard Schultz. FedEx, which quit matching employee 401(k) contributions, spent $595,875 on the security of CEO Fred Smith. Walt Disney spent $645,368 for CEO Robert Iger; Occidental Petroleum spent $575,407 for Ray Irani; and McKesson spent $401,706 for John Hammergren.

December 1, 2009 0 comments